We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [1]
It was Mary Woolford. I’m not proud of this, but I couldn’t face her. I reeled. My hands went clammy as I fumbled with the carton, checking that the eggs were whole. I rearranged my features into those of a shopper who had just remembered something in the next aisle over and managed to place the eggs on the child-seat without turning. Scuttling off on this pretense of mission, I left the cart behind, because the wheels squeaked. I caught my breath in soup.
I should have been prepared, and often am—girded, guarded, often to no purpose as it turns out. But I can’t clank out the door in full armor to run every silly errand, and besides, how can Mary harm me now? She has tried her damnedest; she’s taken me to court. Still, I could not tame my heartbeat, nor return to dairy right away, even once I realized that I’d left that embroidered bag from Egypt, with my wallet, in the cart.
Which is the only reason I didn’t abandon the Grand Union altogether. I eventually had to skulk back to my bag, and so I meditated on Campbell’s asparagus and cheese, thinking aimlessly how Warhol would be appalled by the redesign.
By the time I crept back the coast was clear, and I swept up my cart, abruptly the busy professional woman who must make quick work of domestic chores. A familiar role, you would think. Yet it’s been so long since I thought of myself that way that I felt sure the folks ahead of me at checkout must have pegged my impatience not as the imperiousness of the secondearner for whom time is money, but as the moist, urgent panic of a fugitive.
When I unloaded my motley groceries, the egg carton felt sticky, which moved the salesclerk to flip it open. Ah. Mary Woolford had spotted me after all.
“All twelve!” the girl exclaimed. “I’ll have them get you another carton.”
I stopped her. “No, no,” I said. “I’m in a hurry. I’ll take them as they are.”
“But they’re totally—”
“I’ll take them as they are!” There’s no better way to get people to cooperate in this country than by seeming a little unhinged. After dabbing pointedly at the price code with a Kleenex, she scanned the eggs, then wiped her hands on the tissue with a rolled eye.
“Khatchadourian,” the girl pronounced when I handed her my debit card. She spoke loudly, as if to those waiting in line. It was late afternoon, the right shift for an after-school job; plausibly about seventeen, this girl could have been one of Kevin’s classmates. Sure, there are half a dozen high schools in this area, and her family might have just moved here from California. But from the look in her eye I didn’t think so. She fixed me with a hard stare. “That’s an unusual name.”
I’m not sure what got into me, but I’m so tired of this. It’s not that I have no shame. Rather, I’m exhausted with shame, slippery all over with its sticky albumen taint. It is not an emotion that leads anywhere. “I’m the only Khatchadourian in New York state,” I flouted, and snatched my card back. She threw my eggs in a bag, where they drooled a little more.
So now I’m home—what passes for it. Of course you’ve never been here, so allow me to describe it for you.
You’d be taken aback. Not least because I’ve opted to remain in Gladstone, after kicking up such a fuss about moving to the suburbs in the first place. But I felt I should stay within driving distance of Kevin. Besides, much as I crave anonymity, it’s not that I want my neighbors to forget who I am; I want to, and that is not an opportunity any town affords. This is the one place in the world where the ramifications of my life are fully felt, and it’s far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.
I’d enough of a pittance left over after paying off the lawyers